Media Mentions

Walter Dellinger, a renowned scholar of constitutional law and one of the top legal figures in the Clinton administration, which he served as head of the Office of Legal Counsel and later as acting solicitor general, died on Wednesday at his home in Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 80. ... Laurence Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, advocated for that law and lobbied Mr. Dellinger to join him in supporting it. He failed, and Mr. Dellinger won the case. “No one could have been a worthier adversary,” Mr. Tribe said in a phone interview. “It was always a learning experience to grapple with Walter, and always exhilarating to have him on your side when you agreed.”

A bipartisan group of lawmakers on Feb. 10 enacted one of the most momentous workplace rights reforms in more than a decade, and Congress’ most significant legislation against sexual harassment and abuse since the #MeToo women’s movement began five years ago. ... Terri Gerstein, a fellow at the Harvard Law School Labor and Worklife Program, told me the legislation is an “important first step,” and a major accomplishment, especially given the stark partisan divide in Congress and businesses’ strong interest in keeping disputes out of court. “I would not understate what a real accomplishment this is, and how meaningful it is to women who have faced harassment and assault,” Gerstein said. “It demonstrates a bipartisan recognition that forced arbitration is unfair to workers and that the secrecy is a problem.”

In Civil Rights Queen, author Tomiko Brown-Nagin profiles Motley, a Black woman who wrote the original complaint in Brown v. The Board of Education and was on Martin Luther King's legal team.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group of law professors and others on Wednesday urged the Eleventh Circuit to reject Apple's appeal of a lower court's decision that Corellium LLC's "virtual" version of the iPhone to detect potential bugs was protected by copyright's fair use doctrine. ... Several copyright professors, including Rebecca Tushnet of Harvard Law School, filed their own briefs in support of Corellium on Wednesday, saying that the "public benefits when copyright owners do not have a monopoly on information about the potential flaws in their works."

An article written by Lawrence Lessig: The Supreme Court’s decision last week to reverse the finding of a three-judge panel that Alabama must redraw its 2022 Congressional map after violating the Voting Rights Act — a ruling the Supreme Court reached without the benefit of full briefing and argument—has raised again the question of what could be done about the court’s use of the “shadow docket.” Here’s one answer: Congress should give the justices a filibuster.

A group of voters in North Carolina is challenging Republican Rep. Madison Cawthorn's eligibility to run for reelection, arguing his actions on Jan. 6 and support for overturning the election disqualifies him under a constitutional clause barring any federal official who has "engaged in insurrection" from holding office. ... Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor emeritus at Harvard University, contends that, even if it's determined Cawthorn didn't "engage" in an insurrection, if the public focuses "on the words giving aid and comfort to an insurrection -- words in the 14th Amendment -- the evidence seems more than sufficient."

In recent months, the Supreme Court has stepped into one controversy after another—taking a case that threatens affirmative-action programs, creating a road map for states looking to copy Texas’s S.B. 8 and nullify constitutional rights, and using the shadow docket to signal major changes to abortion and voting-rights laws. In a matter of months, the Court seems poised to both dramatically expand gun rights and overrule Roe v. Wade. Polling demonstrates that the Court’s popularity has fallen to an all-time low, driven by perceptions that the justices are partisan. The Court’s conservative majority seems remarkably unconcerned about potential damage to its reputation. That may come as no surprise: Supreme Court justices have lifetime tenure unless they are impeached. ... All of this makes it important to understand what we mean when we talk about the legitimacy of the Supreme Court. As the Harvard Law professor Richard Fallon has shown, defining legitimacy takes some work. It can refer to the Court’s moral standing—a concern most acutely raised in legal systems, such as those of Nazi Germany, that sanction obvious human-rights violations. Legitimacy, too, can refer to the perceptions of the legal community—do lawyers, judges, and academics believe that the justices are using reasonable interpretive methods and applying them in good faith?

Only a few years ago, the federal agency that regulates the transmission of electricity, gas and other energy matters was looking into ways to prop up coal, in line with former President Donald Trump’s fossil fuel agenda. ... The long queues of projects awaiting a green light from PJM or other grid operators can be seen as good news, showing a strong interest in renewable energy, said Ari Peskoe, the director of the Electricity Law Initiative at the Harvard Law School.

Nearly nine months ago, Andy De Leon was shot in the head in an ambush in West Miami-Dade. The man accused of the shooting, a jealous security guard who worked at a zoo featured on the Netflix “Tiger King” series, remains jailed awaiting trial. De Leon, 30, once a vibrant physical therapy assistant, remains in a bedridden “vegetative state,” awake and breathing on his own, but unable to speak or move. ... The family’s frustrations are not unusual, said Michael Ashley Stein, a professor and executive director of the Harvard Law School Project on Disability. Because the health-care system and policies have been created piecemeal over time, he said, various agencies don’t always “interact well and people fall through the cracks.”

An article written by Catherine Grace Katz (JD '23): In 2014, six weeks after Russia invaded the Crimea, Google Maps took a major step, one that the United States, United Nations, and international community still refuse to take: it recognized the Crimea as Russian territory—but only on some versions of the product. While users in Ukraine still the saw the version of Google Maps everyone was used to seeing—no demarcated border between the Crimea and Russia, but a light gray line indicating an internal border within Ukraine—on the Russian version of Google Maps a solid line suddenly appeared between Ukraine and the Crimea. To users in Russia, this line reflected what the Russian state asserted with its armed invasion. The Crimea unequivocally belonged to Russia. Meanwhile, users of the standard .com version of Google Maps saw a third reality: a dashed line between the Crimea and Ukraine indicating that the border was now disputed.

Six couples who met at Harvard recall their first dates, first kisses and first impressions.

Nationwide, police agencies and prosecutors agree that the increased use of confidential informants, or ‘CI’s, has been a boon to fighting crime, especially when it comes to drug trafficking. They claim that informants can often go places and pierce certain social and criminal circles that an undercover officer can’t. Why? Because CIs are often known criminals who got ‘caught in the act’ and were offered a deal: Help make cases against others and you can stay out of jail. Using a known criminal in a key position of trust might sound like a ‘dicey’ proposition and in fact, many in law enforcement call CIs ‘a necessary evil’. ... Meet Alexandra Natapoff, a professor of law at Harvard University, a former Federal Public Defender, and widely considered to be the top expert on confidential informants and their impact on our legal system. Her take? “It results in wrongful convictions,” says Natapoff. “It results in often police corruption. It results in the wrong people being charged and convicted or punished for the wrong things.”

An op-ed written by Terri Gerstein: Finally, some good news came from Congress. The Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act passed in the Senate on Thursday and heads to President Joe Biden to be signed. The bill prevents employers from forcing their workers to bring sexual harassment or assault cases before secretive arbitrators paid by the boss, instead of before judges in open court.

As Republicans impose new restrictions on ballot access in multiple states, President Biden has no easy options for safeguarding voting rights despite rising pressure from frustrated activists. Unlike on other issues such as immigration or environmental protection, the White House has little leverage without congressional action as the November elections creep up. “If there were some sort of easily available presidential power on this, others would have done it,” said Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a Harvard Law School professor who researches election law. “There is no significant unilateral authority here.”

An article co-written by Emma Svoboda (JD '23): Tensions between Russia and Ukraine have escalated significantly in the past month, with reports of Russian troop buildups and recent U.S. and NATO deployments to the area. Speaking in Berlin in late January, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken cautioned that Russia was “poised” to take aggressive military action and warned that Russia may stage a provocation as a pretense for military intervention. Russian representatives have denied Blinken’s allegations and accused the United States of fomenting a crisis. With tensions mounting, Russia’s intentions—and whether it will mount a large-scale attack—remain unclear.

After the new year, when an Amazon warehouse worker showed up to the sprawling facility where he works in Rialto, Calif., he noticed a lot of colleagues seemed to be missing. Stations were empty, he said, and workers were constantly moved around to fill in for those gone. It seemed like everyone was working mandatory overtime. ... “It’s a very serious matter when you have a state attorney general suing a major international corporation for violating a law that is so clearly important and relevant to what is happening to workers on the ground right now,” said Terri Gerstein, fellow at both Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program and the Economic Policy Institute. “This isn’t a mom-and-pop. This is one of the largest and most powerful companies in the world.”

A contentious decision from the US Supreme Court in a Voting Rights Act case from Alabama this week previewed what could be a momentous legal battle over the 1965 law, which over the past several years has been repeatedly whittled down by the conservative justices. ... "Alabama's proposal would turn the VRA into a race-blind statute that only looks into what this hypothetical race-blind process would produce," said Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a Harvard Law professor who specializes in election law. "And so the consequence would be just substantially less minority representation in America."

A book review by Laurence Tribe: From Plato’s Republic to Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, from Pascal’s Pensées to Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, writers have pondered the Noble Lie—the morality of resorting to falsehood and delusion to conceal, usually from the masses but sometimes from oneself, truths whose revelation would wreak havoc, or at least do more harm than good. It is a question that Justice Stephen Breyer, the dean of the Supreme Court’s liberal wing and its fiercest proponent of the Enlightenment values of truth and reason, might have taken up in his latest book, The Authority of the Court and the Peril of Politics, published a few months before his recent announcement that he intends to retire from the Court.

The Supreme Court appears ready to strike another blow at the Voting Rights Act. In a 5-4 decision Monday night, they upheld a congressional map a lower court had tossed out. Host Scott Tong discusses the implications with Harvard Law professor Guy-Uriel Charles.

On Jan. 27, President Biden made history by announcing that he would nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court by the end of February. “While I’ve been studying candidates’ backgrounds and writings, I’ve made no decision except one,” Biden said in remarks made at a White House event to formally announce the retirement of 83-year-old liberal Justice Stephen Breyer. “The person I will nominate will be someone of extraordinary qualifications, character, experience and integrity. And that person will be the first Black woman ever nominated to the United States Supreme Court. It’s long overdue.” ... “African American women have historically operated under the disabilities of being women and Black, particularly during times when those groups had less power,” Annette Gordon-Reed, a Harvard law professor and Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, told Yahoo News. “To fight through, that has often required great resilience and creativity.”

When three federal judges last month blocked Alabama’s new Republican-backed map of US congressional districts as likely discriminatory against Black voters, they said they were applying “settled law” and that the outcome was not even close. An increasingly assertive conservative-majority US Supreme Court disagreed. The justices froze the lower court’s ruling and allowed Alabama to use the contested map of the state’s seven US House of Representatives districts for the November 8 midterm elections in which Republicans are seeking to regain control of Congress from President Joe Biden’s fellow Democrats. ... “If the court accepted Alabama’s argument, that would be the end of Section 2 as we know it,” said Harvard Law School Professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos, an expert in redistricting. “It would become far harder for plaintiffs to win Section 2 cases, and states could eliminate many existing minority opportunity districts without violating the statute,” Stephanopoulos said, referring to districts in which minorities have a better chance of electing lawmakers of their choice.